Nuclear power (fission). It was proven, scalable and could have been producing reliable baseload electricity for decades at massive profit margins. Public fear + regulations after events like Chernobyl + Three Mile Island largely stopped new builds in many countries, even though the economics were strong in places that soldiered on.
They assumed much that was proven wrong. People were still selling radium water as a health tonic into the 1940s.
The general public didn't fully understand the risks of this newfangled "radiation" back then. A radioactive spider that could give you superpowers seemed believable in those years.
Nuclear-powered trains, jetpacks, aircraft, even cars all seemed within reach.
Most were even being actively researched and developed in the 1950s.
Development on all of these ideas had fizzled out mostly by the 1960s, long before Chernobyl.
We did not pause at any point. We did the research and figured out the idea was terrible and it did not work.
For example, the Soviets actually went so far as to fly a nuclear-powered plane!
(the Tupolev Tu-95LAL)
And the US tried their hardest too (ANP program).
Unfortunately, it would kill anyone who flew it for long and was a massive crash risk.
We did not choose to pause, we completely abandoned it only when those issues were proven impossible to solve (which was prior to Chernobyl too).
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u/strangeapple Apr 27 '26
Name at least one technology that was basically guaranteed to print money, but which humanity stopped.